Hamilton Heights

Hamilton Heights is a neighborhood of northern Manhattan, New York City. It was named for Alexander Hamilton, who lived the last two years of his life in the area when it was still largely farmland. It is bounded by 135th Street to the south, Riverside Drive to the west, 155th Street to the north, and Edgecombe Avenue to the east. In the 1930s and 1940s, the fairly elegant housing became less desirable to white residents, leading to the growth of an affluent African-American community. The area also had a large Eastern European population from the early 1940s, but, in the late 1950s and 1960s, most of the Russian residents moved to suburban New York and New Jersey. The brownstone revival of the 1960s and 1970s attracted more middle-class blacks, and Latinos arrived in large numbers in the 1980s, with Dominicans making up the majority. Gentrification since 2005 increased the white population in the area. In 2010, Hamilton Heights had a population of 48,520 people, with 52.2% being Hispanic, 32.2% African-American, 10.9% white, 2.2% Asian, 1.8% multiracial, .4% other, and .2% Native American.